I’m weirded out here. This is a video put out by fanatical, old-school Catholics to tell their followers to obey Canon Law 1251. What is that, you ask?
Can. 1251 Abstinence from meat, or from some other food as determined by the Episcopal Conference, is to be observed on all Fridays, unless a solemnity should fall on a Friday. Abstinence and fasting are to be observed on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.
That’s still a thing?
Anyway, in this video a caterer named Karen shows up at a church event with piles of meat. Lots of unappetizing grey, slimy meat and burgers that look like flattened hockey pucks and hot dogs on paper plates…you know, church food. She also, for some reason has a plush koala toy she uses to hypnotize people to eat her food, and also as an excuse to use a “koala-tee” pun, twice. She is defeated by a guy wearing a fish mask. I present it here as your Sunday morning venture into surreality.
What stuck with me is how dreadful the food looks. Photographing meat, and food in general, is hard, and these guys fail spectacularly at it. That’s just not the vegetarian in me speaking, either — the food is even worse than the humor, which is saying a lot.
What the heck was an octopus doing in the story? I thought they were more intelligent than that.
I think the octopus was there just to draw PZ in. But most people won’t see it, because they won’t be able to watch that long.
Its ofd that they are willing to risk eternal hellfire for a day-inappropriate cheeseburger. It’s as if they actually don’t believe a damn thing they say.
It’s okay ,the lord has said that because Wildfowl and Otters live in water they are really fish ,and therefore
can be eaten on these special days .
I used to wonder why they used to have that fish on Fridays in old calendars. But I’m not Catholic so….. I always thought religion based food taboos were silly
Marcus, one of the participants in the end-credits mentions that the filming was actually done on a Saturday. I suspect these extremists are quite sincere about their superstitions (although some of the staff might just be collecting a paycheck).
Pray for all the pre Vatican II kids who are in Hell for eating a hotdog or burger on Friday, back in the day when it was EVERY Friday, not just one. According to the nuns, being hit by a bus after the hotdog and before getting to Confession was a common fate for these evil sinners!
In other words, you can eat beaver but not cock?
I watched it and said in a voice loud enough for my wife to hear, What the fuck was that? Bad buffet meat, Time Tunnel graphics with a Mesmer koala, a besuited Dagon fishman, a fuzzy octopus hand, ditzy people in a cafeteria? My wife, a lapsed Catholic, came over and watched the video. It made some kind of sense to her. No meat on Fridays because . . . Jesus on the cross. She had to remind me that today was Easter. So meat is now in? I asked. Yeah, she replied, meat on Easter was totally good. Easter ham, right? All clear? Yeah, I guess.
In France, the tradition is still here in some form or other.
Every Friday, in most restaurant serving French cuisine, the menu of the day will be some fish.
Same thing for the school restaurant, which often serve fish that day.
There is no obligation anymore and few people even realise it’s a religious thing) but, in an historically catholic country, it leaves some mark (and Easter Monday is a public holyday, which mean I can whil home, like every day for the last year…)
Even the Church Militant© has joined the Karen-bashing fad?
Where do they find traditional doctrinal authority for that?
@9
My first thought before reading the post was “What a lousy attempt at a Deep One costume.” I’ll pass on the video unless I really have trouble thinking of anything else to do today.
Not the original intent but there’s some health conscious reason for eating fish instead of overcooked hamburgers. The Catholics should market the wonders of grilled salmon. Just no fish sticks or mercury laden fare.
The video was so bad it was good. Was the octopus fumbling around with a blue screen?
Hey at least there was no Kirk Cameron or Kevin Sorbo in this video.
Humor, you say?
From Newsthump, Britain.
“Jesus arrested for emerging from tomb during lockdown.”
Fish is holy on Easter? Wait until I tell the people in South Sweden they should eat lutefisk and fermented herring every Easter! The octopus is more appropriate on Chtulmas, at the end of the thirteenth month.
“Otter and wildfowl live in water”.
And capybara! You could make a fortune selling capybaraburger during Easter in Catholic countries.
R L Foster @ 9
“A besuited Dagon fishman ”
So the pre-christian version of easter was about making war on the fishmen, a religious conflict between Eastre folliwers and Dagon followers.
It’s still a thing in my rural Australian town. This place is heavily Italian Catholic and the butcher next door to my shop gets in fresh fish every Friday.
They also do a stations of the cross march on good friday. Though the huge crucifix they drag around has a wheel on the bottom which seems like cheating. And for some reason this year there was no drum being banged slowly as they went past. I like the drum, it really upped the Monty Python “Bring out your dead!” vibe.
When I was a kid, our little rural midwestern school always served fish sticks on Fridays, which was great, since I loved fish sticks (go away South Parkers). But I have no idea why, since we only had one Catholic family, maybe two at most? in our district. Protestants were not usually so accommodating to Catholics back then, so it still seems kind of odd.
Ridana@18 Interesting. Maybe the practice had been adopted indirectly from neighboring areas, or who knows really.
I went to a Catholic grade school in the Philly suburbs, and most days you just brought a brown bag lunch. They did have cheese pizza sometimes (or tomato pies, which are a Philly thing I never liked much) for purchase. These were probably sync’d with Fridays, but I don’t really recall. My high school would not have served meat on lenten Fridays, but I have absolutely no recollection of what they served.
Ridana @18: It’s not just Catholics. Lutherans, Methodists and Anglicans have their own requirements/guidelines regarding the avoidance of meat on some or all Fridays.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friday_Fast
Bloody hell. I lasted 40 seconds watching that video, and it’s put me off my breakfast completely.
If I can’t face food I think I’ll go open a bottle of brandy instead. Still allowed that at Easter, right?
I know some Lutherans here in Finland observe the Lent season in some form, but it’s not visible in society at large in any way. Orthodox and Catholic people are too few and far between to make an impact.
However, school and workplace cafeterias do have a curious tradition of often serving pea soup on regular Thursdays, and even more reliably on Shrove Tuesday (ie. just before the Lent begins), often combined with pancake for dessert. Traditional pea soup is thick and mushy, and usually contains fatty pork scraps. Historically, eating pea soup seems to have been the Nordic way of celebrating “carne vale” ie. the last chance to enjoy good food before either Lent or Friday Fast. (We aren’t really big on carnivals here, generally speaking)
Of course, most modern people don’t really enjoy eating mushed peas, or soft chunks or pork fat. Hence, the modern cafeteria pea soup tends to be a literally watered-down version, with relatively small amount of peas in proportion to the pork, which is low fat mincemeat. There’s even a vegan version, which substitutes mincemeat with textured soy protein, which is amusing since originally the protein would come from the peas, and the pork fat could be substituted with vegetable oil.
Cladistically speaking, surely we, along with all craniates, are fish. So cannibalism is fine on Fridays!
One of my senior colleague at work was one of these zealous Catholics who felt it was his duty to police the faithful. I had lunch with a friend on a Friday and she had a hamburger, and later in the afternoon he cornered her and gave her a scolding. She just laughed at him, but he was always very serious about his own self importance. We nicknamed him “The Pope.”